Stephen Lendman

As issue is destroying social America, increasing the unprecedented wealth disparity, punishing ordinary households, impoverishing growing millions, and providing limitless funding for militarism, imperial wars, and corporate favorites. Also ahead is toughening police state harshness against non-believers. America's at the precipice of full-blown tyranny.

Washington's fiscal cliff debate is doublespeak deception. Republicans and Democrats share guilt. Language refers to expiring year end tax breaks and unemployment benefits. It's also about sequestered/largely discretionary year end $1.2 trillion in cuts coming to address them. Republicans and Democrats share guilt. Backroom double-dealing planned them months ago. The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. It's perhaps worse now than ever. Details alone remain working out. Both parties are in lockstep on policy. "Thirdworldizing" America is planned.

A previous article said only Republican Nixon could go to China when America had no diplomatic relations. Only Democrat Obama dares end America's decades-long social contract. His mandate is eliminating government's responsibility for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and publicly-funded pensions. Straightaway in office, he attacked social America. He promised deep cuts. He sold out constituents who expected better. He did what they thought impossible.

Another article said he matched Star Trek. He went where no administration went before. Imagine what's ahead in term two. He's unrestrained. He'll throw America's most disadvantaged and middle class under the bus. Expect him to take full advantage. In 2010, his Simpson-Bowles National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (NCFRF) recommended deep Medicare cuts, higher Medicaid co-pays, and restrictions on filing malpractice suits, among other ways to end Washington's responsibility for healthcare incrementally.

Philip Giraldi

If there is one word missing from the United States government’s post-9/11 lexicon it is “accountability.” While perfectly legal though illicit sexual encounters apparently continue to rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, leading to resignations, no one has been punished for malfeasance, torture, secret prisons, or extraordinary renditions. Indeed, the Obama administration stated in 2009 that it would not punish CIA torturers because it prefers to “look forward and not back,” a decision not to prosecute that was recently confirmed by Attorney General Eric Holder in two cases involving the deaths of detainees after particularly brutal Agency interrogations. What the White House decision almost certainly means is that the president would prefer to avoid a tussle with the Republicans in congress over national security that would inevitably reveal a great deal of dirty laundry belonging to both parties.

The bipartisan willingness to avoid confrontation over possible war crimes makes the recently completed 6,000 page long Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture an extraordinary document. Though it is still classified and might well never see the light of day even in any sanitized or bowdlerized form, its principal conclusions have been leaking out in the media over the past two weeks. It directly addresses the principal argument that has been made by Bush administration devotees and continues to be advanced regarding the CIA torture agenda: that vital information obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques” led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to the report, no information obtained by torture was critical to the eventual assassination of the al-Qaeda leader, nor has it been found to be an indispensable element in any of the other terrorism cases that were examined by the Senate committee. What exactly does that mean?

Philip Giraldi

The Kagans in Basra, Iraq

The Beltway power couple who boosted the Iraq invasion insist we stay longer in Afghanistan.

A recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Kimberly and Fred Kagan argues “Why US troops must stay in Afghanistan.” The article demonstrates clearly that the number-crunching Kagans know exactly how many combat and support troops it takes to man an army base in Jalalabad and they pile Pelion on Ossa to demonstrate how a residual force of roughly 34,000 US soldiers can “continue to conduct counterterrorism operations in Southeast Asia” after 2014. They conclude “the United States can stabilize Afghanistan if it maintains around 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan into 2014, dropping to over 30,000 thereafter … the idea that the war is inevitably lost is a convenient mask behind which decision makers hide to deflect responsibility for pulling out troops who are making a real difference. We have argued that the current defeatism about Afghanistan is overdrawn and unfounded … .” We cannot “abandon the fight against al-Qaeda and its allies in South Asia.”

But the op-ed also demonstrates that the Kagans continue to be clueless over the question they raise in their title: “why” we Americans are in Afghanistan at all and they fail to demonstrate any understanding of how outside forces can impact on a limited military presence’s viability in a foreign land.

They make the same mistakes in their predictions of the likely course of developments as they did regarding Iraq. Like the Iraqis, the Afghans will have a say in their future and might not like the idea of continuing to grant legal immunity to a foreign occupying force. Nor does it appear that the perpetually rebuilding Afghan army will ever be battle ready, meaning that the American soldiers will become trapped in their bases, hostages to Afghan internal politics. Like it or not local sentiment does matter, even to a superpower, and it can serve to derail the best laid plans of the Kagans and Joint Chiefs of Staff.